Word: wordplay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Instead of bowing before MTV's shiny-suit-ridden, treble-enhanced Jam of the Week, I pit myself against the MC I have yet to meet through lyrics saturated with wordplay and allusions and urban imagery and political consciousness. I pump my fist when a colleague on stage instructs me to, roam sidewalks with a perennially playing walkman, love few things more than a huddle of cats dropping science to beatboxes and split cheap cigars open while listening to my newly-purchased Roots album (by the way, buy it now, it's truly ridiculous...
...REAL THING Tom Stoppard His witty wordplay would make even the Bard proud...
...understandable. The playwright, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and educated in India and England, catapulted to fame with a different Shakespearean work: the 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an existential reimagining of two characters from Hamlet. Since then his work has been known for its wordplay and highbrow subject matter--such as chaos theory in Arcadia, or the life of poet A.E. Housman in The Invention of Love, now running in London. Many of his plays have been criticized for their emotional inaccessibility, but, says Stoppard a bit testily, "If people think it, then they think...
...within the medium is the name of the game here, and the author seems to enjoy tossing out symbols for their own sake, creating linguistic tricks, and taking flat-out risks--at once point, the word "Ha!" is repeated without interruption over nearly two entire pages. But this Joycean wordplay, disconcerting at first, eventually becomes clear for what it usually is--humor. And that's where the stories get their power. On a surface level, they're a series of often depressing vignettes about dissatisfied, disillusioned adults, but underneath one can find a slightly sardonic, yet often mirthful tone that...
...beach in the summer or in front of the fireplace on a cold Sunday night. The stories, as mentioned before, tend to start sounding the same when read quickly in order, and they deserve better than that. By reading them carefully, Moore's talent for description, clever wordplay and power through subtlety can be discovered and admired...